Bullets, Beer and Buffalos – Surviving the Outback
I migrated to Australia many years ago, when life was a lot simpler than it is these days. Within a week, I left Sydney for Darwin where I’d planned to work with a friend on a buffalo station, helping to build an abattoir. Sadly we fell out after a couple of months and I was back in Darwin, looking for a job. I got a job driving a truck for a week. I should’ve stuck with that but I ended up on another buffalo station, a fully functioning one.
By the time I arrived at Mudginberry Station, some two hundred miles south of Darwin, the sun was fading. After dodging wild pigs and stalling the old Austin A30 while crossing a creek, I felt pretty good about getting here at all. I pulled up by the impressive homestead where two fellows stood, chatting.
‘G’day,’ I said. ‘I’m Kim. I’m here to work in the abattoir.’
They looked at me and smirked. I was covered with the grey dust of the dirt track I’d travelled; it sticks to the sweat on your skin and to your wet clothes. One of them pointed to some older buildings on the other side of the airstrip, saying ‘John Barling’s the bloke you want.’
I drove around the airstrip in the fading light and stopped outside a shack, where I could see people sitting around a table on a kind of porch enclosed with fly screen. A wiry bloke in shorts came out to greet me. His black beard and leather-brown skin he made me think of a Mexican bandit.
‘You must be Kim,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘John Barling.’ He grinned as he looked me up and down. ‘Bloody rough country, hey? Get some of that bloody dust off ya and come inside. You’re just in time for tea.’
I heard a clunk behind me and saw John laughing his head off. I turned around and saw the Austin leaning on its front bumper, a wheel lying on the ground next to it. ‘Shit.’
‘Pommy cars are no bloody good around here,’ John said. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll fix the bloody thing tomorrow.’
Over ‘tea’ and several beers I met the rest of the crew. They looked more or less like John: rough as guts, as they say around here. John’s wife, an ex-school-teacher, was the only one who looked neat – she was the one who’d offered me a job here, last week in Darwin where I met her through a friend.
A few months ago, I’d finished high school in Hamm, a dull town on the edge of the Ruhr, the heart of Germany’s steel industry. I’d come to Australia looking for adventure, as you do at nineteen. The broad Aussie accent of the Northern Territory was a far cry from the English I’d learnt at school and I was still struggling to follow conversations. Aussies tend to mumble as well, more so in the bush since the flies crawl into your mouth if you open it too far.
As I answered their questions, one of the guys gave me a strange look. ‘You’re not a Pom, are you?’
‘No, I’m German.’ It was 1966 and I expected my nationality to be a problem.
He smiled. ‘That’s alright then. Rommel said: give me a division of Australian soldiers and I’ll conquer the world.’
I hadn’t expected the field marshal to have celebrity status in outback NT. ‘What’s wrong with Englishmen?’ I asked.
‘They whinge all the time, and they don’t wash.’
His summary seemed to sell the English short but I was glad to get off so lightly.
After dinner I followed my new companions to our quarters, a tin hut with slats for windows, a bunch of bunk beds and a table in the middle. We sat around it, drinking more beer and listening to Beatles records. Even at this late hour I was in a sweat. I was so tired I excused myself and crashed on my bunk.
‘Can’t handle a few beers,’ were the last words I heard.
Breakfast was in the same place as dinner, the chicken coop. The food was the same too: buffalo steak, eggs and white bread. At seven, we were at the abattoir, waiting for Bill the shooter. Bill was a rough version of Paul Newman. He’d left at dawn and soon came back with two dead buffaloes on his trailer. I wondered why they didn’t call him Buffalo Bill.
After we’d winched them onto the concrete landing, Bill hopped back into his Landcruiser with its chopped-off roof and shot off again, a cigarette between his teeth and the wind in his hair.
Wayne showed me how to skin a buffalo. He made it look easy, starting near a hoof and working up to the body with his knife, as if he was unzipping an overall. Thor cut the belly open to get the guts and organs out. Blood and piss washed around my boots. It took three of us to shift the stomach, a bloated grey thing.
‘Stab it with your knife,’ Thor told me as he and Wayne stepped back. I did what I was told and the stench nearly knocked me off my feet. They laughed and laughed. High School doesn’t prepare you for life, does it?
Soon the beasts were ready for Claude, the meat inspector. He lived across the airstrip at the ‘Hilton’. That’s what they called it over here. Claude wore a beret and sported a black mo but when I tried my French on him, he looked confused.
I was the rouse-about, as they call it. I’d chip in on the slaughter floor when the rush was on or I’d give Bruce a hand boning, or I’d help the two aborigine women trim meat. One of them was pretty and smiled at me more than once.
‘Stay well clear of her,’ was Bruce’s advice, ‘unless you want to wake up with a knife in your back.’
I had enough trouble adjusting to my new environment. If the days were an exhausting grind of blood and guts and sweat and flies and mossies, the nights were dull. We ate buffalo meat, drank beer and talked. After that, it was back to our quarters for more beer and talk and Beatles. I grew up with Mozart and Beethoven. I also liked Dylan and Donovan. Some nights I played their songs on my guitar, under the light outside the cold store, until the monster mozzies forced me back inside.
The nights belonged to the vampires and the days were ruled by squadrons of sticky flies that homed in on the moisture around your eyes, nose and mouth. The glowing stories I’d read about the great southern land never mentioned the flies or the mossies.
‘It’s your shout,’ Thor would tell me back inside the dorm and I’d trudge back out to the cold store. The lanky Norwegian drank more than anybody. He didn’t contribute a lot else. Bill the shooter didn’t talk much, either; Bruce and Wayne did most of that.
Bruce’s voice sounded like the whining diff in the truck I drove in Darwin. He had a constant sniffle that he’d wipe with the back of his hand. He shaved about once a week. He even looked sweaty at breakfast, in the relative cool of the morning.
Wayne was about my age, jet-black hair, tattoos on his arms that matched the dark blue of his faded blue Bonds singlet. If he wasn’t smoking a cigarette, he was rolling one. He’d left home at fourteen to get away from his ‘bastard of an old man’. I soon discovered that all the guys were here to get away from somebody: the cops or a divorced wife chasing them for alimony.
Wayne had learnt to talk like the others: grown-up and tough. For Wayne, the world was a source of wondrous surprises, which he tended to express with succinct phrases like ‘Fuck me rotten!’
I never asked what that meant. Sexual terms doing duty as swear words was very confusing for this young German. I admired the discipline these blokes showed in the chicken coop, when Mrs Barling was with us. The F word would turn into bloody, F me became bugger me, and dirty Cs became bloody bastards, all in the blink of an eye. Despite that accommodation, she kept her two kids right away from us.
Wayne showed no restraint when he flicked through magazines in the dorm, gaping at photos of pop stars and Hollywood celebrities. It was the closest any of us got to women out here. I can’t imagine what Wayne would say these days, in response to the pussies they thrust at the cameras of Penthouse.
Once a week, a semi would pull up with supplies, and that night there’d be pumpkin and potatoes to go with the buffalo. In the morning, we’d load the truck up with frozen meat bound for pet food processors in Darwin.
One day, a different semi arrived to collect the buffalo hides. They were as heavy as buggery and there was no shade where we were loading them. I began to feel faint but I toughed it out, still smarting from the slur of not being up to scratch in the drinking stakes. That night I went to bed early with a killer headache, which I kept to myself.
The next morning I couldn’t get my head off the pillow, it was pounding so hard. To my surprise the guys didn’t make fun of me; they said I looked green, pushed a bowl and a towel at me and fetched Mrs Barling.
She checked me over and asked a few questions. You were loading hides in the midday sun, and you weren’t wearing a hat? I don’t own a hat. Probably sunstroke. That’ll teach you to respect the sun in the territory!
She came back with a cup of tea and a blanket for the window, to stop the sun stabbing my head. I started throwing up. The pain in the head got so bad I kept passing out. I lost count of the days I lay there semi-conscious, only waking to drink and to throw up what I’d drunk.
One morning, Mrs Barling came to my bed with a cheerful bloke in a salvation army uniform. ‘This is Major Woods,’ she said. ‘He can take you to the Mission Hospital in Arnhem Land, in his aeroplane.’
I looked at them. The heavens had sentenced me to slave labour and condemned me to a diet of buffalo meat and beer. Then they’d tried to kill me by frying my brains. Now they wanted to finish me off. I knew it, but I was too weak to put up a fight.
‘You’re very sick,’ Mrs Barling said, as if I didn’t know.
As I sat behind the Major in his single-engined Auster, trying not to throw up all over him, my head throbbing to the thrum of the engine, I passed out again.
I woke up the next day, I think, glimpsing a starched white uniform. The nurse smiled and told me I would live. In fact, she promised I would get better soon. She spoke the truth: a couple of days later, the Major was back to return me to Mudginberry. His flying scared the life right back out of me and this time I told him.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, ‘I have to hug the contours – the instruments are on the blink.’
That night over dinner, John Barling’s black eyes sparkled with delight, as he said, ‘You’re bloody lucky, Kim.’
I let out a sigh. ‘That sunstroke nearly killed me.’
He chuckled. ‘I’m not talking about the bloody sunstroke, mate.’ He nodded toward Wayne. ‘Tell him.’
Wayne gave me his ‘you won’t fucking believe this’ look. ‘That Major Woods,’ he crowed, ‘do you know how many planes he’s crashed?’
‘No.’
Wayne held his hand up, looking around the table to ensure the other guys were watching. ‘FIVE!’
I was about to use Wayne’s favourite expression when Mrs Barling walked in.
‘I’ll be buggered,’ I said.
‘Five bloody planes,’ Wayne repeated, ‘and the bugger’s still flying!’
John and the others were heaving with laughter.
Mrs Barling wasn’t. ‘Why’d you have to tell him that? The Major’s a good man. God looks after his own.’
John gave her a crooked grin. ‘He’d bloody want to, in his case.’
John was a tinkerer. One day, the semi brought a shiny new set of wheels for his Landcruiser and John asked Wayne and me to help put them on.
‘You fucking beauty,’ Wayne said, ‘where’d you get them from?’
‘They’re aeroplane tires,’ John said. ‘Had the bloody rims specially made, in Darwin.’
He turned to me. ‘These trucks last two seasons before the bloody wheels fall off, like on your bloody Austin. There’s no vehicle built for this bloody country. With these wheels,’ he said, ‘I’ll bloody well float over the rough stuff.’
As soon as we’d bolted the wheels on, John bounced off into the scrub for a test drive. He’d invented the all-terrain vehicle long before its time; wide wheels and Desert Dueller tires, like Penthouse, were still way in the future.
When we finished work that day, John still hadn’t returned so Bill the shooter went out looking for him. Thor, Wayne and I jumped into the old Land Rover with everything chopped off and followed.
John’s rifle shots helped us locate him just before dark. Behind him was his moon mobile, sitting on four flat tires.
Wayne’s eyes were enormous. ‘Fuck me dead,’ he stammered.
That was poetry compared to what came out of John’s mouth. He swore he’d take the wheels back to the bloke in Darwin and shove them right up his big arse.
‘What the fuck happened?’ asked Wayne, rolling a cigarette.
It wouldn’t be right for me to repeat what John said because he was in quite a rage. From what I could gather, the tires had slipped on the rims and torn the inner tubes.
Bill the shooter helped calm John down. He turned to us. ‘You blokes better come back first thing and put the old wheels back on this thing.’
Dinner was late that night. John had settled down by then, even saw the bright side of it. ‘The truck bounced around so much I could hardly steer the bloody thing,’ he said. ‘I was going in all bloody directions at once – it was like riding a bucking ‘roo.’
He said bucking, I’m pretty sure.
One afternoon a couple of blokes turned up, one in a truck with a steel cage on the back, the other in a ‘cruiser with its top sawn-off and a steel platform welded to the front, crowned with the biggest bull bar Wayne had ever seen. By now you’ll know what he said.
John invited Gunther and Dave in for dinner. Gunther was ‘one of my mob’ and he’d come to sell John his buffalo catching services. The end of the dry season loomed and the buffaloes had figured out that Bill had a limited reach, imposed by Claude the meat inspector: the beasts had to be in the cool room, neatly carved up within an hour of meeting Bill’s bullet. Gunther could go further out and bring back live buffaloes.
Next morning, the two were gone by sparrow’s fart. They came back hours later with four buffaloes on the truck. The bad news was that Dave had broken his right arm.
Lucky for him, the bloke I’d met on my arrival at the Hilton was having a chat with John. It was a strange sight, the clean-shaven boss-cocky in his crisp blue shirt, his new hat and cream moleskins, talking to leather-skinned John in his grubby shorts. The boss-cocky offered to take Dave to Darwin in his Cessna. Where was he when I lay dying?
I’d asked my comrades a while back what the blokes across the airstrip did.
‘It’s a tax dodge,’ was Bill’s response.
‘They’re a bunch of wankers,’ Bruce scoffed.
Some nights, I’d look across the strip at the brightly lit Hilton, listening to the distant laughter, wondering how wanking could be that much fun. I also wondered what I’d done to end up on the wrong side of this strange world.
John was paying me 12 pounds a week, but a quick check with his wife revealed that my earnings were growing at just two pounds a week after the beer was accounted for. I told her that I’d gladly cut down on the beer but she shrugged that off.
‘I have to take an average,’ she said. ‘The boys wouldn’t like it any other way.’
Mateship meant all for one and one for all. I had to grin and bear it. I’d come to realize that the Territory was not the land of my dreams, and planned to leave as soon as I’d saved enough money to buy a decent car to go east in; the Austin was back on four wheels but it’d be lucky to make the trip back to Darwin.
Over dinner, Gunther asked John if one of the fellas could step in for his side-kick Dave. John looked around the table and found all eyes avoiding his. Even gung-ho Thor looked down at his plate of buffalo meat.
John gave me that grin of his. ‘Hey, Kim, you’re the biggest bugger here. Why don’t you give it a go?’
I weighed 220 pounds before I started here; now I was as lean as John. Let me tell you, these high protein diets really work, especially when you spend your days wrestling with dead buffaloes. Now he wanted me to wrestle with live ones. The eyes of the others were on me. It’s a male thing: you can’t say NO when you’re put on the spot like that, so I said I’d give it a go.
Wayne’s eyebrows went up as he exhaled cigarette smoke through pursed lips.
‘Bloody good on you, Kim,’ John said and slapped me on the back.
Gunther smiled. ‘Great. I’ll show you the ropes in the morning. Nothing to it.’
In the morning I followed in the truck as Gunther led the way through the scrub, flat as far as the eye could see, and bone-jarring. When the dry heat bakes the ground, the hoof prints left by buffalos in the wet season turn rock hard.
Eventually we came upon a herd of buffaloes and Gunther stopped. Time for him to show me the ropes – steel ropes. He stood on the ‘cruiser’s front platform and held up a noose.
‘You drive next to the buffalo,’ he said in his thick German accent. ‘I throw the noose over his head and when I give you the signal, you slam on the brakes.’
‘What happens then?’
‘When the buffalo runs out of rope, he falls down. I jump on him and hold his head down by the horns while you tie his legs up. Then we winch him on the truck and get the next one.’ He grinned. ‘It’s dead simple.’
English is a compact language: to translate ‘shit-scared’ would take a hole sentence in German. I couldn’t think of a way to tell Gunther that I needed to go behind the bushes, in either language. It’s that male thing again: what would he think of me?
I bit my lip and drove his ‘cruiser toward the herd, with him standing on the front verandah, steel rope in hand. The buffaloes started to run off in all directions. He pointed to the biggest one and I went after him.
‘Faster,’ Gunther yelled. I grit my teeth, foot hard on the gas. I had trouble lining up the beast, which was ducking and weaving; Gunther was bouncing up and down on the steel platform in front of me because of the rough terrain. When I got close enough to the buffalo, Gunther threw the noose over his head. ‘Hit the brakes; stand on them,’ he yelled and braced himself on the bull bar.
The rope lifted off the ground and there was an almighty twang that nearly threw me out of the truck. I don’t know how Gunther stayed on the platform. Big Buff was still standing, however, shaking his head like a boxer who’d taken a big hit. If his name were Wayne, I could imagine what’d be going through his mind.
‘Reverse, fast,’ Gunther screamed.
I did but Buff followed at full gallop. Shit! He was gaining on us.
‘Drive faster, in a circle.’
Have you ever tried outrunning a charging buffalo, driving backwards in circles? I turned left; I turned right, but the thing followed my every turn.
‘Drive faster!’ Gunther screamed.
How the … ? I had the engine revving, the gearbox whining. On my next turn I got lucky: Buff went the other way.
‘Hit the brakes.’
I did and thought the cable would snap from the jolt. I don’t know how it didn’t. Buff crashed to the ground as Gunther leapt off the truck and ran toward him. I grabbed some rope and followed. He had the beast’s head pinned down by the ends of the long horns. Buff’s legs were still free and it took me a while to get the front ones tied up, my hands were shaking so much.
Gunther was getting anxious. ‘Come on, I can’t hold the bastard down forever.’
Buff’s hind legs kicked hard and his bloodshot eyes left no doubt about his frame of mind. When I got him tied up Gunther jumped clear. He checked my knots while I fished a cigarette out of my shirt pocket. It was soaked in sweat.
He drove me back to the big truck and I backed it up to big Buff so we could winch him up on the tray. We caught three more buffaloes in that fashion.
Gunther seemed happy with the day’s work. ‘You handled yourself OK.’
‘I’m not doing this again,’ I said. I didn’t care what he thought of me anymore. I wanted to live long enough to leave Mudginberry and find the world I’d lost.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t that bad.’
I climbed into the driver’s seat of the big truck. I couldn’t think of anything that could be worse. Wrestling crocodiles?
Over dinner in the chicken coop, Gunther talked about our day’s adventures and sang my praises. Wayne’s mouth was stuck open. Even Thor raised a respectful eyebrow.
John grinned. ‘Knew you could bloody do it, you big bugger.’
This time, my will to live prevailed. ‘I’m not going back out tomorrow.’
They looked at me, all of them.
‘Why not?’ John demanded.
‘I might be green but I’m not stupid.’
Consternation all round.
‘What about one of you blokes?’ Gunther checked, looking around.
John’s eyes followed his. My companions were looking every other way.
‘I can’t do it on my own,’ Gunther pleaded. ‘I’d have to go back to Darwin to find someone else. The season’ll be over soon.’
Still no takers.
John shrugged. ‘Sorry, mate.’
On the way to the dorm later, Wayne was talking to Bill ahead of me. All I could make out was the punch line, ‘Catching the bastards live? Fuck me stupid!’
Bill nodded. ‘You wouldn’t catch me near one without a 303 in my hand.’
Gunther left for Darwin in the morning. I’ve never been so happy to say goodbye to someone.
The old 303 was Bill’s weapon of choice but John had bought himself a shiny new Remington 375 Magnum, complete with telescopic sight. He went out shooting with Bill when buffaloes became scarce, as they were now. The Magnum looked like it could kill a buff a miles away.
One Sunday morning we sat around the breakfast table, chatting. John was polishing his gun. He pushed some cartridges into the magazine, bigger than my middle finger. All the blokes admired the thing except Bill. He always said ‘a real shooter doesn’t need anything bigger than a 303.’
A big fat crow landed outside the coop and let out its horrible ‘argh, argh, aaaaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh!’ Shooting crows was a bit of sport around here but they were canny buggers: as soon you picked up a rifle or anything that looked like a rifle, they were gone. If you could hit a crow at all, you were considered a good shot. A shotgun improves your chances but real shooters don’t use shotguns.
As it happened, John’s Magnum was on his lap when the crow landed, pointing in the right direction. Once more the crow burst into song: ‘aarrgghh, aarrgghh, aaaaarrrr – BANG!’
John had fired straight through the fly wire. For the next five minutes it rained crow feathers. His wife came into the coop and stood there, mouth open, looking at the feathers raining down and the smoking hole in the chicken wire. ‘John, that’s the limit,’ she said and stormed off.
John was pissing himself laughing. We all were.
‘Bugger me dead,’ Wayne said, looking at the feathers, still raining down.
Not long after that I told John I was leaving. He gave me one of his wry grins, nodded and said, ‘Bit bloody rough for you, isn’t it?’
‘I just want to move on.’
‘Good luck to you then. We gave you a fair go, didn’t we?’
‘Sure.’ Within his parameters, he had.
His wife was less happy to see me go. ‘Thought you were settling in well, Kim.’
‘I did my best, but it’s time to move on.’
The boys weren’t surprised. They knew right from the start that I wouldn’t last.
Wayne showed genuine concern. ‘Anything you need, Kim? Some beer? Some petrol?’
He made sure the Austin’s tank was full and the oil topped up.
‘Take care of yourself,’ I told him. ‘And get the hell out of here. Do something with yourself before it’s too late.’
He shrugged as he rolled another cigarette. ‘Yeah, I will, one of these days.’
About twenty years later on a pleasant Saturday morning, I sat on the deck of my house in Avalon on the northern beaches of Sydney, reading the weekend paper. A headline on page 4 caught my eye: ‘Meat Workers Dig In at Mudginberry.’ The subtitle said: ‘Strike lames Northern Territory meat industry.’
Couldn’t be the same place, surely! But it was: Mudginberry had grown into a large commercial abattoir, and its workers were demanding better conditions such as air-conditioned quarters, danger money, a living away from home allowance and more. Their current earnings were close to $1,000 a week, the paper said.
I had to laugh, and then laughed some more. I knew exactly what Wayne would’ve said.
